Could romcoms really save your marriage?

Watching five soppy films a month and then discussing them with your spouse can reduce the likelihood of divorce, apparently. But don't take relationship tips from the following …

Academics at the University of Rochester in New York have concluded that romantic movies could save your marriage. Even though you thought the secret to a lasting union might be support, emotional transparency and fidelity, professor Ronald Rogge has found that watching five soppy films a month and then discussing them with your spouse can drastically reduce the likelihood of divorce. Which seems like odd advice, because romantic movies – romcoms in particular – are loaded with all sorts of terrible relationship tips. For example:

Mamma Mia!

Reading this on mobile? Click here to viewInject some fun back into your marriage by cartwheeling around the failing hotel that you own and apparently neglect to maintain, while your husband makes a noise like a stabbed elk.

Music and Lyrics

Try to recapture some of your relationship's old magic by collaborating on a creative endeavour; for instance, you could try writing a song together. Also, it helps if your wife is wildly, obviously, massively inappropriately too young for you.

Sleepless In Seattle

Allow your children to dictate your romantic life. Perhaps you could start by asking them where the pair of you should go out to dinner. Pretty soon you'll have eaten so many free Pizza Hut ice-cream refills that you'll be blind with diabetes and your spousal issues will become comparatively irrelevant.

Love Actually

Sporadically declare your love for each other by hiding in a bush, luring your spouse to your front door and forcing them to stand in terrified silence while you present them with a succession of increasingly creepy cuecards with all your most disgusting and unrealistic sexual fantasies scrawled on them. Alternatively, if you're six years old, get your recently bereaved dad to live out his botched romantic ideals vicariously through you, regardless of the detriment this will obviously have on your ability to function emotionally in later life.